The Citadel, one of the first urban outlet malls in the country, drew throngs of shoppers and intense media coverage when it opened in late 1990. But today, even with consumer spending at near-record levels, the mall is fading.

Hoping for a revival, the City of Commerce has put the distinctive Assyrian-style mall off the Santa Ana (5) Freeway up for sale, along with five adjacent office buildings.

The buyer, however, must agree to almost double the size of the mall, an expansion that the city feels is necessary for it to compete with several larger outlet malls that have opened in recent years.

“It’s getting pretty dead,” said Georgina Velaszco, assistant manager of BCBG, a women’s clothing store in the Citadel. “We don’t have very many tourists. We used to get buses of people.”

Several store managers interviewed last week said sales are not what they were in the early- to mid-’90s, although some said they are up from last year. The Asian crisis has definitely taken its toll, several store managers said, with fewer Japanese tourists visiting the L.A. area in recent years.

“Foot traffic is not the same,” said Reina Carrillo, who manages the London Fog store. “It’s picking up a little.”

Last year, the stores had sales of $47 million ($320 a square foot), down from $54.3 million ($370 per square foot) in 1991, according to Justin McCarthy, director of community development for the City of Commerce. There currently are two store vacancies, which the city’s brokers are negotiating to fill.

“It’s subject to greater competition. When it first came in, it was the only factory outlet in the region,” McCarthy said. “Half a million square feet of outlet space has come on the market in the last five years.”

Outlets, which typically offer savings of about 30 percent off regular prices, have since sprung up or been expanded in Ventura County, Ontario and at Cabazon, near Palm Springs. The competitors typically have upwards of 250,000 square feet of shops. The Citadel, by contrast, has only 147,000 square feet, encompassing 48 shops and restaurants.

One store manager said the opening last year of Mills Corp.’s Block in Orange also seems to have siphoned customers.

“It needs to be bigger,” McCarthy said. “It is a little undersized for a typical factory outlet. That’s why we’re going through the marketing process to facilitate the expansion, so we can compete.”

Indeed, Carrillo said the “No. 1” remark she hears from customers is, “That’s it? This is all?”

A shopper interviewed last week agreed that the center’s smaller size is a drawback.

“I prefer (the outlet mall in) Camarillo because it’s huge,” said Sarah Warner. “If I were going to go on the weekend, I wouldn’t come here. The stores don’t thrill me.”

Merchants and city officials cite other factors for the Citadel’s gradual drop-off in sales. For one, despite its prominent urban location fronting a major freeway where 250,000 motorists pass daily, many people still don’t know the Citadel exists.

“They go by on the freeway, but they don’t know it’s a mall,” Velaszco said.

An information packet mailed out to potential buyers indicates the city’s desire for “a more dynamic invitation to the project from the adjacent freeway,” which could take the form of “creative electronic or active media that pulls, compels or entices patronage to get behind the wall.”

“The wall” is the 1,700-foot-long frontage decorated with relief statues of kings and griffins. It is one of the most prominent remnants retained from the 1929 Uniroyal Tire plant.

While a lack of “dynamic” signage and larger competing outlet malls clearly are factors in the Citadel’s slide, another has been the drop-off in tourist trade. It used to be that 800 busloads of tourists visited a year. Since the onset of the Asian financial crisis, that number has fallen to about 200, said Sam Messiha, member of the Citadel’s merchant advisory board and president of Prime Time, which sells watches and sunglasses at the Citadel.

The city is looking to sell the Citadel’s structures, but retain ownership of the underlying land, leasing that to any buyer under a ground-lease agreement.

Such a structure provides the city “a vehicle to retain long-term revenues and architectural and land-use control on an irreplaceable architectural element,” because the historical structures cannot be altered, McCarthy said.

The unusual architecture was inspired by ancient Assyrian palaces and includes a historic, ziggurat-style office building in addition to the 1,700-foot-long front wall.

Built in 1929, the Citadel was one of several large industrial plants that cropped up in the early part of the century. The Uniroyal plant closed in 1978 and remained boarded up for 10 years before a joint venture of Copley Real Estate Advisors and Trammell Crow Co. undertook an $118 million conversion into an outlet mall as well as renovation of the site’s historic office building and construction of four new office buildings. (The partnership also developed a hotel on the site, which is not part of the properties that the city is looking to sell.)

The city took over ownership of the Citadel property last year, after the developers and their lender decided not to build another office building on the site, as had been required under their lease agreement with the city. They had concluded that the market could not support another office building at that time.

The city had been working with Trammell Crow and Copley to convert that office requirement into a retail expansion, McCarthy said. But then Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. merged with Copley’s parent company. Met Life decided the Citadel wasn’t an “appropriate assets for their portfolio,” McCarthy said.

By the time the city assumed ownership, the property’s value had dropped about 30 percent from its early-1990s value.

While the Citadel’s outlet mall has faded, its office buildings have improved lately. When the city took over the project, the 271,000 square feet of office space in five buildings was 30 percent vacant. But with Smart & Final leasing 80,000 square feet for its headquarters late last year, the vacancy rate is now just 5 percent. Smart & Final’s arrival has also spurred weekday foot traffic at the shops a bit, merchants said.

McCarthy said the city has not decided on an asking price for the Citadel, but that the proposed annual ground-lease rate will start at $1.2 million.

“We’d like to see people come in and tell us what it’s worth,” he said.

Proposals are due by Sept. 15.

McCarthy said 10 to 15 parties “seem intent on evaluating the opportunity,” and that one of the project’s original developers, Trammell Crow, is “among the interested parties.”